That was the 60th MIFF that was – Part II: Cold Fish through to Oki's Movie

Here's Part II of an A-Z of my 2011 MIFF, resuming from where I left off on Wednesday.

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Cold Fish

You can read my thoughts on Sion Sono's calculatedly unhinged Cold Fish as few as two Little Lies Down ago. My getting around to his other MIFF 2011 film, Guilty of Romance, will have to wait for its Madman DVD release.

Essential Killing

Essential Killing

I had very much looked forward to the second feature of Jerzy Skolimowski's comeback, and notwithstanding the interference run by some very inconsiderate, wouldn't-shut-the-fuck-up dingbats I had the misfortune to find myself sitting beside at the Forum, I enjoyed it very much.

Vincent Gallo, as Mohammed, a desperate Taliban fighter on the run in a palpably very alien environment – a wintry Eastern European hinterland rather than the desert rabbit warrens and plains of his flashbacks – puts his body on the line every bit as much as Skolimowski himself was wont to do, on either side of the camera, in the production of his earlier films. And hence: a First Blood for the 2010s, one where shades of grey in the morality-viewer identification nexus could scarcely be any shadier or greyer.

Highly accomplished sound design considerably elevates Essential Killing. In an incident early on in the film, Mohammed is subjected to an appreciably eardrum-pulverising attack which gives him about as awful a case of tinnitus as I'd care to imagine. The profundity of its effect upon him is very well conveyed and serves as an elegant aural metaphor for his inability to make sense of his plight, post-capture, in which he is at first taken to an Abu Ghraib-esque prison to be interrogated by thuggish American military – the piercing ringing in his head completely drowns out every word barked at him by his interlocutors, which he might very well not have been able to understand anyway – only to then be rendered to what we, but not he, can tell to be an Eastern European backwater, where, no matter how much of his hearing might return, he even more certainly wouldn't be able to understand anybody he should meet anyway. Whereupon he sets forth to make good an unlikely escape which will push his adherence to a halal diet to the very limit...

Fruit of Paradise

You can read my largely ecstatic response to the double-billing of Věra Chytilová's Fruit of Paradise and Jan Švankmajer's Surviving Life as few as three Little Lies Down ago, though were you to do so, I'd ask that you please bear in mind that I feel I need yet to qualify an ill articulated assertion or two I made back then, and about Surviving Life in particular. This is something I will do asap, in Part III of my MIFF 2011 A-Z.

Innocent Saturday

Alexander Mindadze's film, set around the discovery by a young member of the Communist Party faithful that all is not at all well with the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, really rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way at this year's MIFF, and while I can't say I loved it, I believe I can at least see where it's coming from.

The chief problem had with it seems to have been the ostensible idiocy of the conduct of the film's lead, Valerij (Anton Shagin), who fails to skip town with a pretty young thing by the narrowest of margins – a broken heel robs them of a ticket the hell outta there on evidently the only passenger train leaving Prypiat, a town an atom's split away from the smouldering reactor – and then foregoes any further wholehearted attempts to leave town, instead falling intractably back in with a bunch of knockabout good-time locals, including some erstwhile bandmates he'd previously fallen very heavily out with. (Matter of fact, he'd denounced some of them!)

Instead of fleeing, knowing that every second he and his friends remain in town further imperils, or at least, compromises, their very lives – as well as those, it is understood, of successive generations – they instead all throw themselves headlong into the bacchanalia surrounding a party for a triple wedding, as evidently do too the films' cameraman (Oleg “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days” Mutu) and editors Dasha Danilova and Ivan Lebedev – the screen is seldom still for more than a few frames at a time!

But here's the thing: Valerij's mannered, seemingly self-destructive conduct is not in fact so very odd; there's tonnes of this sort of gallows saturnalia in cinema produced and/or set in the states of yesteryear's Soviet Bloc. In, for example, the 1960s cinema of Slovakian auteur Juraj Jakubisko, or in the more recent cinema of the more celebrated Emir Kusturica, as well as in the films of many others, there is reflected clearly (and, from my own experiences in that neck of the woods, most assuredly!) something of the fatalistic character of the peoples in those parts of the world. For these are people who, if go down they must, they'll go down swinging...

(An aside: Anton Shagin is saddled in Innocent Saturday with a haircut-moustache combo so ghastly (but appreciably historically accurate) that I completely failed to recognise him as the actor who was so terrific as Mels in Valeriy Todorovskiy's absolutely fantastic musical of a couple of years ago, Hipsters. Oh won't some kindly soul release that around these parts on DVD? Must I do everything myself?

International Shorts – Misfits

Las Palmas

There was a clear stand-out in this fairly strong thematic compilation of shorts, and that was Swedish animator Johannes “Puppetboy” Nyholm's ingenious and utterly hilarious Las Palmas, in which several marionettes staffing a holiday resort, patronised by several other marionettes, have to contend with the havoc wrought by one most unruly tourist, played by a (live, human) baby!

Johannes Nyholm has uploaded an excerpt from the wonderful Las Palmas to Vimeo – this you have to see!

Two other strong works also came from Sweden, both giving the impression of being calling cards from directors keen to make features. Adam Berg's In makes for a very atmospheric and suspenseful several minutes mostly spent watching two men fumble about in the dark in a railway tunnel which seems to have more than the stock standard number of mysteries deep within it, while Hugo Lilja's gripping, half hour-long The Unliving riffs on the idea of zombies becoming a new proletariat, and is only just beginning to get to the meatiest of issues surrounding the difficult logistics and ethics of this scenario when it ends, too soon by half.

Still, The Unliving is so assured a production that I wouldn't be at all surprised if it reappears in its entirety within a feature-length extrapolation upon itself, so confidently are its themes, narrative directions and aesthetics handled.

The last of this package worth mentioning is Jonathan Caouette's All Flowers in Time, a happy little mindfuck of a short in which Chloë Sevigny clearly enjoys herself no end and a certain amount of wry social commentary gets utterly swamped by a relentless ADHD cavalcade of video art silly buggerising about. Still, boring it isn't.

International Shorts – O Canada!

The main attraction of this shorts package was always going to be the Spike Jonze/Arcade Fire collaboration, Scenes from the Suburbs. My anticipation was high; my expectations, however, were not met.

I probably should have read more from the get-go into the “Scenes” of the title – it hints at an excerptedness, an incompleteness, to match what the film ultimately feels like it delivers. It's most unsatisfying; Scenes from the Suburbs feels like it's just scraped the surface of a story that needs another hour for its telling.

The premise is well set – it concerns a few teens' coming of age in the thick of inter-suburban warfare, with the action unfolding at a measured pace and with songs from Arcade Fire's “The Suburbs” album intermittently underscoring the narrative. Time and care has been taken to ensure that the milieu and antagonisms are well established; the characters well fleshed out, the songs well used...

But unfortunately, half an hour in, Scenes from the Suburbs just ends, utterly anticlimactically, apropos of nothing in particular, just as its narrative was starting to take matters into interesting directions. It's most frustrating, and suggestive that the entire enterprise was really not as well conceived as it might have been.

Of the other shorts in “O Canada!”, Nadia Litz's How to Rid Your Lover of a Negative Emotion Caused by You! is a well performed, blackly funny two-hander, pleasingly following through to a satisfying conclusion a gross-out literalisation of new age notions concerning the benefits of the expulsion of negative emotions from one's, and, in a couple, one another's, bodies. And two short shorts involving trips to medical professionals, Anne Émond's single-shot Sophie Lavoie and Martin Thibaudeau's Cold Blood, both successfully subvert expectations to generate genuine pathos.

Into Eternity

I've already written as much as I care to on Into Eternity as few as two Little Lies Down ago.

Jeonju Digital Project 2011

Jean-Marie Straub's An Heir is unmistakeably a Straub film, for better and for worse. It certainly won't win anyone over who's seen anything previously from the Straubs and found it too austere and mealy-mouthed for their liking. Still: there's a tracking shot through beautiful Alsatian countryside to enliven An Heir's ponderous literary proceedings, which are in all likelihood allusively apropos of matters I'm ill-equipped to grasp or comment upon at the time of writing.

In To the Devil, Claire Denis has pre-emptively produced a documentary DVD extra for an as yet unfilmed feature of hers set around the alluvial borders of French Guyana and Surinam and focusing on the exploits of a gold miner of singular renown in the area, one whom you might say is something of “a character”. At least, he certainly will be once Denis and actor Jean-Christophe Folly, accompanying her on this shoot, are through with him. Interesting, but only to a point, and that point's one a few minutes shy of To the Devil's 45 minute runtime.

José Luis Guerín's Memories of a Morning is far and away the most engaging of the three films in the Jeonju Digital Project 2011, a veritable Rashomon ad absurdum, if you will, in which the factual death by suicidal plummet of a testifiably mediocre violinist in Barcelona is borne posthumous documentary witness through the recollections of a great number of neighbouring apartment-dwellers and shopkeepers.

While Memories is concerned with a tragic incident, and umpteen different takes upon it, it's very charming and funny and paints a delightful picture of modern-day suburban Barcelonan life. It comes highly recommended, though I'm not sure how easy it'll be to track down, not least for a fair while, anyhow.

Melancholia

Lars von Trier's latest film is a strident rejoinder to anybody who might ever think it wise to tell you when you're depressed that you should simply get over it – that, whatever it is, “it's not the end of the world”. Because, in fact, it fucking well is.

Melancholia

Just as with his notorious Antichrist (2009), von Trier opens proceedings with a sequence of supremely beautifully composed, ultra-slo-mo images, though here in exquisite full colour rather than in Antichrist's equally beauteous black-and-white. And while the film asserts that it's in two parts – "Part One" principally concerning a wedding which goes comically, then simply, very sadly, wrong, and "Part Two" the imminent apocalypse, beginning just a few days after the wedding – it really must be considered a film of parts in number three. For the introductory sequence features imagery synthesising elements of both the other two parts, with that imagery indigenous, as it will turn out, to neither of them, such that one can't help but suspect that the introduction must be a prognostication on the part of the film's melancholic protagonist, the bride Justine (oh, The Misfortunes of Virtue indeed!), of the apocalyptic events to come – in fact, she even explicitly big-notes her powers of clairvoyance at one point in the narrative proper – and hence: her debilitating, wedding-sabotaging despair, on what should have been the happiest day of her life. Because, when you know Melancholia to be bearing down upon you – for that is the name of the planet destined to collide with, and destroy, the Earth – what can you do other than play into its hands and fall irretrievably into despond?

Kirsten Dunst is, as everybody has said, very good indeed as Justine; a fine supporting cast has everyone from Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt through to Kiefer Sutherland and Udo Kier (as a dismayed wedding planner) really enjoying themselves as well.

A Melancholia and Innocent Saturday double-bill would make for an interesting inter-film conversation. But while I can only mildly enthuse over Innocent Saturday; I won't equivocate one little bit on my feelings for Melancholia – I think it's grand. One of the best at this year's fest, fer sure.

Oki's Movie

I wish I'd also seen Hong's The Day He Arrives at this year's MIFF, but, for now, all I have to say about the cinema of Hong Sang-soo can be found in a blog post, featuring a couple of paragraphs on Oki's Movie, had two Little Lies Down ago.

That was the 60th MIFF that was – Part I: Autoluminescent through to Closing Night

It had been amongst my best intentions to post several dispatches from the frontlines of the 60^th Melbourne International Film Festival but, too soon!, the end of the festival was upon me and I find that my blog post tally for MIFF 2001, including this post (but not, of course, including its implicit sequels), runs to but five instalments.

Still, I have no regrets, especially as one of my other outlets for waxing cinephilic, 3RRR's “SmartArts” program afforded me, in the absence last Thursday of its ailing host Richard Watts, but in the presence of kindly Triple R legend Tim Thorpe, an unprecedented 45 minutes of airtime to talk about all things MIFF. (I'll be on again tomorrow morning, too, at 11.30, with Richard back in the fold, to prattle on a little more about the 60^th MIFF.)

Meanwhile though, here's Part I of an A-Z of my 2011 MIFF. More will follow in coming days.

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Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard
Dirs: Lynn-Maree Milburn & Richard Lowenstein
Present for a post-screening Q&A: Richard Lowenstein; Genevieve McGuckin, and Mick Harvey

Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard

And so I begin with, in fact, the final film I saw at MIFF2011, and a very satisfying way it was indeed to close the festival (bar the shouting... of some last drinks).

One surefire testimony to an effective rockumentary is whether it inspires the viewer to want to further investigate the recording career of the documentees. I'm only really familiar with the late Howard's (no relation) early work with The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, but I'm now very keen to get better acquainted with his latter day projects, and you can call me a Jenny-come-lately all you like!

Instigated by Howard himself, who was aware at the time that he mightn't have terribly long left to live owing to a liver disease likely linked (if not by this film, directly) to a many years-long heroin habit, this heartfelt documentary's many pleasures include a wide-ranging selection of talking heads paying tribute to his influence upon the art of rock guitar, an influence which has clearly hitherto gone under-acknowledged. Additionally, I really appreciated Wim Wenders' appearance, which shed some light on how post-Birthday Party bands of both Nick Cave's and Rowland S. Howard's wound up featuring prominently in his 1987 classic Wings of Desire, something I'd long been curious about.

I saw Autoluminescent with a dear old friend in Matt Boyle, a most apt person to see this film with indeed as, way back in the mid-'90s, he and I performed some volunteer work at the then Performing Arts Museum, auditing its unruly film and video collection ahead of handing it over to the then Cinemedia. Now, come 2011 and lo!, and behold, if that isn't in the early moments of Autoluminescent some of the very footage Matt and I excavated during our PAM audit, in which a very young Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, and friend ham it up hilariously in a thoroughly ramshackle (presumed mock-)interview.

Volunteer work – the gift to others that often, and at the most surprising moments, keeps on giving back!

A Useful Life
Dir: Federico Veiroj

A Useful Life

An enjoyable featurette in which filmmaker and Senses of Cinema founder Bill Mousoulis' doppelgänger Jorge (Jorge Jellinek) learns that, yes, while Cinema is Life (he has toiled away for 25 years at the (fictionalised) Uruguayan Cinematheque in Montevideo ahead of its (equally fictionalised) close, due to its having become financially unsustainable), when Life becomes Cinema – as, for example, upon the now jobless Jorge's being let loose into the real world, with his every action newly being given a rousing, big band soundtrack (and who hasn't fantasised about that?), and with those actions now even extending to indulging in a little carefree stairway hoofing – things can take a turn for the even better. Because, you never know – you might just get a root.

Flip crassness aside, A Useful Life is a really charming film about cinephilia. It was paired with The Little Tailor (d. Louis Garrel), another film steeped in a love of the seventh art but about which I have much less kind things to say. The Little Tailor is not bad, per se, but to anybody wanting to re-live the joys of the French New Wave, they're still to be found fresher in the readily accessible early films of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol, etc (though it's early Godard and Truffaut in particular that The Little Tailor is channelling). Disappointing.

Animation Shorts

Kubla Khan

In a mostly underwhelming compilation of recent animated work, Joan C. Gratz's Kubla Khan stood out, with Gratz's psychedelically fluid claymation, rendered in her patentedly painterly style, a fine match for an accompanying recitation of William Taylor Coleridge's opium-sozzled poem. Hooray! – you can watch it here.

The one Australian short in this package was Aww Jeez (d. Michael Greaney), also a claymation and which got some easy laughs from riffing on a scenario in which an adolescent Jesus Christ is babysat by a rehabilitated Satan, with their stickybeak neighbour, Richard Dawkins, getting a droll word or two in edgeways.

Artavazd Pelechian Shorts

This program of three films was unreservedly one of the clear highlights of this year's MIFF, and you can read more about my thoughts on it two Little Lies Down ago.

Beginners

I feel a little bad about rubbishing a film which, it has been made well known, is a project very dear and personal to its maker, festival guest Mike Mills. But there's no dodging it: well made as it might be, Beginners lays on thick a self-conscious, greeting cards level of earnest quirkiness that, for mine, sabotages all hope it has of ingratiating itself on any sort of emotionally resonant level, notwithstanding good performances from a twinkle-eyed Christopher Plummer, a Mona Lisa-lite Mélanie Laurent and a mopey Ewan McGregor. Poor McGregor really doesn't have it easy as the film's lead; he's saddled with occasionally having to converse with a dog, to name but one of several ghastly, trite conceits and cloying narrative devices Mills imposes upon him and this film, to its considerable detriment.

Rabid dogs – talking or otherwise – couldn't have dragged me to the “Talking Pictures” conversation with Mills after seeing this film. Thing is, though, that I know other people will like Beginners for the very same reasons I didn't. I'll try not to begrudge them that.

Black Venus

Black Venus

Post-colonial feminist film theory has a new standard-bearer. Abdellatif Kechiche's follow-up to his superb The Secret of the Grain was my feel-bad hit of the festival, an unrelenting, unrepentingly harrowing and very long (159 minutes) depiction of one South African woman's suffering at the hands of two men who enchained her to a hateful, grotesquely exploitative and alcoholic life as the “Hottentot Venus”, an early 19^th century freakshow attraction, with first one of them manipulatively parading her before London's incredulous lower classes and then the other, even more forcibly, mock-setting her upon the Parisienne aristocracy. Alas, even worse indignities were to follow.

I generally bristle at talk of “brave” performances, as such is used all too often to describe when some Hollywood lovely is merely cast against type in some sort of halfway unflattering role (perhaps appearing without make-up (the horror!) or as a dreadful homosexual (further horror!)) But Yahima Torres is simply extraordinary as Saartjie Baartman, a role which calls for her to exhibit exactly the sort of behaviours – and to a similarly uncomfortable extent, the anatomy – which so tawdrily fascinated audiences rich and poor in the early 1810s, just as they did even more so those French anatomists who were keen to announce the “Hottentot Venus”, with her very pronounced buttocks and elongated labia minora, as the “missing link” between the animal kingdom and mankind.

Really strong stuff, I doubt I could ever bring myself to watch Black Venus again, but power to Abdellatif Kechiche for making it in the first place.

Class Relations

You can read my thoughts on Straub-Huillet's take on Kafka's Amerika as few as two Little Lies Down ago.

Closing Night – Drive

I should perhaps consider myself a little fortunate, but, unlike on Opening Night, this time I was where the action was, in cavernous old Cinema 6 in the Greater Union complex. Having missed her Opening Night address, I was happy to catch Michelle Carey's close-of-festival address to the freeloading and faithful, which inevitably riffed a little on the 60^th anniversary of the august festival she is newly Artistic Director of.

Her speech considered the manifold ways in which the business of running a film festival has changed over the 60 years since MIFF emerged out in the Dandenongs. Certainly, it's changed terrifically even in just the last few with, for example, almost half of the 'films' being projected at this year's MIFF being done so digitally – just as more and more of them are being produced using digital technologies in the first place.

The media landscape has changed very dramatically in even more recent times, too, and the one bum note of Carey's gracious wrap-up speech – little understood then as such by most of the crowd there, I suspect – relates to these very developments. It came when Carey acknowledged the sterling efforts of MIFF's blogathon heroes, leading to a well deserved round of applause for the six intrepid (foolhardy?) new media exemplars who'd each of them committed at the festival's outset, for no recompense, to endeavour to see, and regularly write upon, at least 60 films (or rather, “sessions”) during the festival. Sadly, however, none of those six were in Cinema 6 to receive their thank-you but rather had been, as had I on Opening Night, shunted off to one of the smaller cinemas at Greater Union, where once again no transmission was made of the events taking place in Cinema 6 and folks were left waiting in the dark, so to speak, for the film to begin.

One of the blogathonners, Luke Buckmaster, has already been vocal in his understandable disgruntlement at this careless slighting of the time and energies he and his fellow bloggers had devoted to the festival and, by extension, of an all-too-conceivable concomitant first principle undervaluing on the festival's part of press operating for non-traditional media outlets.

Myself, I think any arts organisation which still presumes traditional media to somehow be inherently superior to new media should be disabused of this notion pronto and not just because it's not, ipso facto, correct, but also because it's surely in these organisations' best interests to be mindful that coverage of their events in the new media world doesn't have limited currency the way print media can. Bad press nowadays can stay bad press for a very, very long time. Add to that the immediacy with which news and opinion can now be widely (and unpredictably) dispersed, wholly removed from the hidebound publication schedules of traditional media, and I think MIFF would be very wise to give a good deal of consideration to how it strategises its new media initiatives for next year's edition, with especial consideration necessary as to how it looks after those it engages with who work within that realm.

Drive

But let's put that behind us now and move onto the Closing Night film, Drive.

Nicolas Winding Refn's latest, Drive has an impassive protagonist in Ryan Gosling's Driver not a million miles – if several hundred years – removed from that of his previous film, Valhalla Rising.

Quite a few parts Jef Costello (Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï (1967)), the taciturn Driver works in Hollywood as... a driver, making a few extra quid on the side doing the odd getaway.

He'd probably get away with it, too, if it weren't for his fancying the woman (Carey Mulligan) at the end of the corridor on the floor of the apartment block where he lives. It transpires that her husband, immediately upon his release from jail, is being set up to take a fall by local mobsters, a fall which will threaten to take the Driver down as well.

There's a little bit more to the plot than that, but some of it's just the stuff of loose ends at any rate, and whether or not those ends get tied up is less interesting to contemplate than the film's aesthetics, which, with more than a gentle tip of a Trilby, harken brightly back to 1980s Michael Mann equally as to the heyday of film noir; one scene especially is very highly reminiscent of Robert Aldrich's classic Kiss Me Deadly (1955). But then, as the beardy grand old doyen of Australian film crit, David Stratton told Cinema 6 in an anecdote introducing the screening, this should come as no surprise. For Refn is a cinema brat, regularly taken along to Cannes from an early age by an uncle in the business.

A lot of fun, Drive isn't, however, for the squeamish; the violence in it, certainly played to some extent for laughs, is sudden, bloody and unapologetically brutal.

But those who like their films cine-literate, along Tarantino-esque lines, and who missed it at MIFF will still have an opportunity to get a real kick out of Drive when it hits cinemas in Melbourne mid-October.

Dispatches from the frontlines of the 60th MIFF continued: Peter Tscherkassky + days 5, 7 and 8

Post Mortem
I had heard such good things about Chilean director Pablo Larraín's previous film, Tony Manero, that Post Mortem came as a great disappointment. An insipid, middle-aged gent works at a morgue and begins an infatuation with a down-and-out neighbouring burlesque performer, rendering him completely oblivious to the horror he abundantly evidently ought be feeling at becoming an accessory to atrocities being perpetrated against Salvador Allende and his regime. His is the most excruciatingly slow of slow-burn descents into madness; were only that he – and the film overall – were much less lifeless. Alfredo Castro's performance in the lead and the extremely drab cinematography both conspire to utterly enervate the film of any and all vitality and to altogether void the final still shot of any of the pathos and horror that its greatly overextended duration suggests it was clearly aspiring to.

Into Eternity

Into Eternity

This is an interesting Danish documentary considering best practices for the safe disposal of Finland's – and, by extension, the world's – nuclear waste, such that it will be safe not just for the foreseeable future but also far, far beyond – 100,000 years into the future, to be precise. For the most part needlessly subtitled – most of Into Eternity's energy industry talking heads speak perfectly good English – more is made in the program blurb of Michael Madsen's documentary asking the “mind-bending central question” of how we communicate with people 100,000 years from now than in the film itself, which doesn't really start to probe this line of inquiry until past the halfway mark.

Even then the interrogation doesn't much assume the more cosmic dimensions I'd hoped it might, instead giving more consideration to matters of governance, bureaucracy and statesmanship. It isn't until close to the film's end when the more interesting, philosophically weighty questions are explored along the lines of: given human nature, now and projected into the distant future, is it better to try to communicate to the future of mankind the existence of extremely dangerous materials buried not all that deep underground (the film doesn't countenance the possibility of any other form of intelligence roaming the Earth within the next 100,000 years), or is it better to cover the whole thing up such that it might become lost to posterity, presuming that it will never later be discovered and so never imperil anybody?

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

Oh, such gender trouble as is explored in Marie Losier's documentary on the pandrogyne that was (and, even beyond the grave, is) the union of industrial music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and their* late inamorata Lady Jaye Breyer!

* Gender trouble always leads to pronoun trouble, as well we all know, but here it assumes a whole new dimension!

Losier's Ballad is a lovely, scattershot tribute, punctuated by kooky performance artsy goings-on, to a relationship forged by a fascinating pair of individuals who sought to deny their own individuation in favour of becoming not just one with another but actually becoming one another. It's unavoidably weighted more heavily towards Genesis' accounts of things, due to his/hers/theirs, of the two of them, being the life spent more in the public eye and, hence, having been well documented; additionally, much of the production occurred after Lady Jaye's passing.

That said, one can't help but feel that Genesis' account of her (I use that pronoun now in the interests of simplicity) all-consuming love for her partner – which extended to the former Neil Andrew Megson's undergoing several cosmetic surgery procedures to greater resemble Lady Jaye – and vice versa) – tells it much like Lady Jaye would have told it, too. They really were each other's other half, literalised to an extent that may never hitherto have been realised in the union of one human being with another. And, hence, pandrogyny.

Here's hoping that some bright spark – hello the folks at the MQFF! – might think to lure Genesis out here for a presentation on this wonderful new gender construct/destruct of their own, peculiar devising.

Peter Tscherkassky – Programs One, Two and Masterclass
I think Peter Tscherkassky made for the most fascinating guest MIFF (in partnership with ACMI) has had in all my many years of engagement with the festival. While he was present for screenings of two exquisitely well projected packages of his extraordinary materialist short avant-garde works, and for generous and enlightening Q&As after both, the peak of Tscherkassky's visitation to Melbourne was surely in his gift of a masterclass to this year's MIFFgoers.

Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine

In this lecture, which he invited us to interrupt any time we had questions, Tscherkassky took us through the organisational principles, philosophies, dark-room jiggery-pokery and aleatory means of footage-wrangling behind his Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), in which footage principally taken from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is manipulated in conjunction with footage of those parts of a reel of film which are not normally ever projected – the instructions for a projectionist etched upon a few frames of any given reel of film ahead of that film's projection – to produce both a stroboscopic re-narrativisation of the Sergio Leone classic as well as a film essay upon the film's projection of its very self by its own protagonist!

The irony of Tscherkassky's, this most analog of practitioners', taking us through Instructions, screened ahead of the lecture and then in portions during it, through a necessary recourse to digital frame-by-frame analysis was, I'm sure, not lost on him, even as it wasn't spoken of during his address. (In fact, he fielded so many questions regarding his practice from a very engaged audience that it really is surprising it never came up. Whereas, in one of the earlier post-program Q&As, the matter of how he feels about women... for example, his mother, did! Perhaps it is ever the fate of the Viennese to be asked such things?)

But so dense is Tscherkassky's layering of fragmentary images, and so rapid the montage, consistent with a lot of avant-garde film practice, that in order for him to illuminate certain key frames within Instructions, which might not even have been consciously absorbed on an initial viewing, it was, of course, necessary to use a digital rendition of the film.

His wonderful masterclass aside, another clear highlight of MIFF 2011 has been seeing Tscherkassky's CinemaScope trilogy projected off superb 35mm prints. Outer Space and Dream Work, in particular, are just utterly ecstatic experiences, every bit as viscerally affective and entrancing as they are virtuoso works of dark-room voodoo.

Oki's Movie
Or: Four Variations upon a Narrative Construct in Search of a Greater Truth (in Filmmaking, as in Life. Because All Life is Cinema, and the Cinema is Life). Or something like that.

This was my first, long overdue, engagement with the much exalted, renownedly cinephilic, reflexive cinema of Hong Sang-soo, and it was every bit that as much as I'd been led to believe. As to how I feel about it: I'm not yet sure, beyond knowing I'd like to see more of his work. Watching Oki's Movie, I got the feeling of an auteur striving for something beyond that which a single film can contain, can communicate; I got a real sense that Hong's approach to filmmaking might well be of a more oeuvrist ambition. Of course, I won't be able to test that hypothesis without seeing more of his films (and, alas, it looks like the screenings of his other film at this year's MIFF, The Day He Arrives, fall inconveniently for me). Still, colour me most intrigued.

And hat's off for the wonderfully awkward filmmaker Q&A depicted in the first of Oki's Movie's four story strands in which a filmmaker, post-screening, is grilled persistently by an audience member, not apropos his film at all but rather along much more personal lines than etiquette ever allows in these forums. But then, cinema is life... life is cinema...

Cold Fish
I enjoyed Sion Sono's Cold Fish much, much more than I suspect I should, in good conscience, ever have been able to. Offering up something of a highly bizarre love pentangle, Cold Fish is of that ilk of extreme Japanese cinema where I have no idea to what extent its cruelties and misanthropy – and especially its misogyny – are the stuff of postmodernist fun and games or to what extent they're simply an extension of the often matter-of-factly rape-y goings-on in films from the heyday of pinku eiga. In Cold Fish, how many parts wallowing in grotesquerie and taboo-tweaking (but... whose taboos? Only ours, as Westerners?) is Sono indulging in to how many parts black-as-pitch, satirical social commentary?

Cold Fish

This makes for a complex coming-to-terms with my own enjoyment of Cold Fish. I'm pretty sure Sono is playing its ghastliest sequences for laughs, and a Melbourne audience, almost despite itself in sometime disbelief, myself included, was forthcoming with them.

Truth be told, I do get a kick out of having my sensibilities challenged, and political correctness be damned, but with a film like Cold Fish, especially when so very well made – Sono is a very gifted filmmaker, and no mistake – there's always a strange aftertaste, and I'm never sure how much of it is distaste, and how much of it wonderment at how little I really know about, in this instance, Japanese culture, tempered by an uncertainty over whether I really wish to understand it better. Might my enjoyment of a film like Cold Fish, where part of the pleasure has to lie in being gobsmacked at the perceived sheer temerity and transgressiveness of its makers and the images and scenarios they've crafted, be lesser or greater compromised for better understanding the societal and cultural conditions which gave rise to it in the first place? And, were I to learn more about such things, is whether I enjoy it or not something I should then ascribe any importance to anyway? On learning more, there might be much weightier concerns to be troubled by than that which is contained by a few reels of film.

All About Ev(a|e) – Opening Night through to Day 4 of the 60th MIFF

Straight off: big shout-outs to all six to have signed up for MIFF's 60 Films in 17 Days Blog-A-Thon; I wish them all the best for what I consider to be a truly lunatic – if not even a somewhat cruel – undertaking.

Fruit of Paradise

Cruel? Indeed! For to needs average seeing three-and-a-half films every day for 17 days, and to write daily, and cogently, about the experience, whilst keeping healthy and somehow still finding time to keep in circulation amongst nearests and dearests, strikes me as a heavy cross to bear. Surely, were it not that this is MIFF's 60^th birthday, there is no way the festival would have thought to oblige bloggers under their auspices to report – in the inaugural year for such an initiative, what's more – on as many as 60 sessions at the festival. It's a figure obviously arrived at simply and arbitrarily to rhyme with the festival's anniversary.

I also can't help but think the imposition of such a demanding target is rather a bastardisation of the spirit of a film festival. For mine, a film festival is not at all just about watching films. To lopside the focus so seriously on the film side of the equation is to greatly disparage the festive side of things. It's to grossly over-esteem the most base form of cinephilia, that which pushes the line that he or she who simply sees the most films wins.

Of course, I won't deny that a festival is a grand opportunity well worth taking to glut oneself on a banquet of cinema from every which where and when. But surely it should also offer ample opportunity to be festive, to enjoy the company of others in an atmosphere conducive to impassioned, reflective, maybe sometimes even a little boozy, discussion and debate about the cinema and, oh, everything else besides: life, the universe and everything. Setting the world to rights over drinks one film analysis at a time.

Heck, I'll admit to a certain selfishness. I'm a little sad I'll not be afforded many leisurely opportunities to chew the fat with the blog-a-thonners in the course of this year's MIFF. They simply won't have much time for it.

But don't get me wrong – I really admire the pluck of all participants, atop any pre-existing admiration – considerable, in some instances – I already have for their critical faculties and output. (Some of these folks I know very well, some not at all, while their work for me had hitherto run the whole Rumsfeldian gamut.) I just hope that, atop their pluck, I'll yet get to admire their fortitude too. I sincerely hope they don't come undone along the way and regret the pact they've made with MIFF. Were any of them to fall debilitatingly sick, would the festival accept any responsibility or liability?

*

OPENING NIGHT

The Fairy

The Greater Union complex on Russell Street, gussied up especially for the occasion, has never looked so good. And, with all due respect, I hope it never has to again, even if I am almost belatedly developing a strange sort of affection for it. It's simply no place for a venerable festival's Opening Night, not least come an anniversary edition, but MIFF was clearly hamstrung when it came to settling upon a venue this year.

Now, while it was a necessary evil to distribute the throngs who came to Opening Night into multiple cinemas within the GU complex, I was nonetheless disappointed at being sequestered away from the main arena, with it coming to transpire that the main events in Cinema 6 were not going to be transmitted into the other cinemas.

I don't think it would have been asking too much for MIFF to have hooked up a feed of the celebratory formalities occurring in Cinema 6 to all the other cinemas packed to the gills with opening nighters. Instead, bundled away with fellow media types, I was treated to a very underwhelming, altogether uninspiring pair of speeches from a couple of MPs, their by-the-book waffle not made any more compelling by frequent microphone cut-outs. The hour was only saved when Fred Schepisi was called to address the room; he immediately abandoned the dodgy mic altogether and simply took to projecting his voice to the back of the room, like an old pro – ministers, take note! (He did, however, hide in the dark while he regaled our very receptive room with his tales of MIFFs of yesteryear.)

Notwithstanding Schepisi's unanticipated cameo, it was a disappointment, both professional and personal, to miss seeing me old mucker Michelle Carey deliver her inaugural Opening Night address as Artistic Director of this sprightly, newly sexagenarian festival. If an Artistic Director gives an Opening Night address, and no media are there to observe and document it, did it really even happen? (Even if keeping us all in the dark is apt, in a punny sort of way.)

On the matter of the poor hand dealt to media, this too: it had proven to be hard work to secure an invite to Opening Night in the first place without resorting to either skulduggery or overobsequiousness, in stark contrast to the ease with which similar benison – and much more besides – can be secured at festivals overseas.

I have a whole dissertation in me upon the matter of Australian film festival culture with respects to an unfortunate, and I presume, nationwide, provincialism, which in turn I believe feeds into a narrow view of the hospitality that ought be afforded to festival guests (amongst whose ranks overseas festivals routinely consider media representatives, whether from near or from abroad).

But my thoughts on how we (“we” being MIFF; other Melbourne and Australian film festivals, and Australian film culture generally) could seriously lift our game and adopt a far less parochial, far more internationalist, outlook, the better to achieve a more internationally relevant film festival culture and, by extension, a more dynamic, outward-looking and extensively globally networked film industry, is beyond the scope of this blog post, and is rather more the stuff of a grand, lunatic research project, funding possibilities for which are being countenanced presently...

The Opening Night film: La fée (The Fairy)

Fortunately, Opening Night's film was a crowd pleaser. Directors Dominique Abel, Australian-born Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy delivered a quite charming, slapsticky, daggy yellow cardigan of a feature. (Present in person for Opening Night, I'll presume Abel and Gordon, who star in the film, too, also said (or humorously mimed) a few words to those fortunates gathered in GU Cinema 6.)

The Fairy reminded me of several Tati-esque cinema forebears. A succession of vignettes, it was not unlike a whimsy-saturated Roy Andersson film, if one was ever made depleted of almost all of his wonderful, piercing, mordant black humour. While I prefer my Tati stylings flavoured with more parts Roy Andersson or Elia Suleiman than this was, I still quite enjoyed The Fairy.

Artavazd Pelechian Shorts

MIFF promised us a revelation with this package of shorts from an only recently 'discovered' Armenian filmmaker, and boy howdy did it deliver, if not quite so emphatically with the first two of the three shorts in this selection, We (1969) and The Seasons (1972), as with the third, the frankly mind-blowing Our Century (1982).

Our Century

We and The Seasons struck me as being the love-children of Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes (1933) and Mikhail Kalatozov's Salt for Svanetia (1930), as if the Soviet montage applied to the latter ethnographic documentary (for want of a better pigeon-holing) had in fact been applied to the former. Very beautiful – and does Pelechian demonstrate a love of action at oblique angles to the frame, or what! – We and The Seasons both are possessed of a lot of jaw-dropping imagery (imagine, for example, a welter of weatherbeaten Bear Gryllses cast in “Man and Sheep vs. Wild”), but it was Our Century that, as an ecstatic apocalyptic space race fantasia, hit me with all the force of a revelation – by comparison, the trip sequence in Tree of Life suddenly seems almost trite, leaden, obvious, unambitious...

The more that Pelechian's work is surfacing, the more is being made of the originality and influence (putatively upon Godard in particular) of his 'contrapuntal' or 'distance' montage – the former term gets a work-out in the MIFF program and in Daniel Fairfax's excellent program notes on the MIFF website; the latter appears in an interview with Scott MacDonald in his essential A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers.

For mine, I would like to posit an affinity in Pelechian's work – and, in particular, in Our Century – with the similarly musically kinetic, in toto associative montage in Jan Švankmajer's work and, in particular, in some of his short films. Our Century reminded me, more than anything else, of the Švankmajer of Leonardo's Diary (1972), which is a similarly ecstatic, virtuosic fugue of apocalyptic imagery indexed to a celebration of genius and human accomplishment, derived too from a collaged patchwork of found footage and self-generated material which, rather than the footage Pelechian shot of cosmonauts going about their business (he'd been granted extraordinary access behind the scenes of the Soviet space program), is instead an array of stunningly animated sketches drawing on the work of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Leonardo's Diary (not at MIFF)

Differing intellectualisations of montage might very well underpin Pelechian's and Švankmajer's practices but the work produced, I find, nonetheless generates very similar – and similarly rapturous – sensations.

(There's more about Švankmajer just below.)

Zebraman 2

Veering immediately from the sublime to the ridiculous, I chased the Pelechian program down with Takashi Miike's Zebraman 2. It was massively, forthrightly inconsequential, and kind of fun, and kind of not. Films like this have me wondering sometimes if there aren't aspects of Japanese pop culture that must be baffling even to the Japanese.

Miike remains an enigma. I'm really looking forward to his 13 Assassins, reputedly classicist after a Kurosawan fashion, which I'll see very soon in release. I know he still has it in him to produce something as profoundly consequential as Zebraman 2 so vehemently, wilfully isn't, but that said, I haven't adored anything of his since 2003's Gozu.

Class Relations (1984)

Straub-Huillet do Kafka, which makes perfect sense. As faithful a Kafka adaptation as I can think of, Class Relations is a perfect fit for the Straubs' patented artfully austere house style, although it hasn't a show of knocking off its perch as my favourite big-screen riff on Kafka, Pavel Jurácek and Jan Schmidt's wonderful Josef Kilián (1963). (Much kudos also to Koji Yamamura for his beautiful animation, A Country Doctor (2007))

Those Straubs, they sure knew how to light a scene! Their compositional sense is exquisite and immediately appreciable as such. The performance styles they elicit from their cast, however, are much more an acquired taste. Some of the cast – including Class Relations' lead (Christian Heinisch) – appear narcotised, wilfully indifferent, throughout this film, while others take more of a grandstanding approach to delivering their lines. All involved are likely, when sharing a frame, to become as still as mannequins while one of them soliloquises at length. Still, that's a good analogue for the dialogue in much of Kafka!

Tomboy

A lovely new queer film from Céline Sciamma, the director of the admirable Water Lilies (2007) (which I wrote a little about in a report in Senses of Cinema on the 2009 Melbourne Queer Film Festival). I found Tomboy very moving; it is my lot in life to invariably be very affected by films depicting the travails of fellow genderqueer folk, and of children in particular, all the more so when they're as well, and as naturalistically depicted, as in Tomboy. It's a beautifully measured film and I wish it to find crossover mainstream success; it's due a release in Australia soon.

All About Ev(a|e): Surviving Life and Fruit of Paradise

Curiously, Surviving Life has dropped “Theory and Practice” from its title (this is, however, consistent with the MIFF program), making my blog post of a couple of weeks ago a little less meaningfully entitled. Never mind.

Psychoanalytic film theory has a new textbook in Jan Švankmajer's sixth feature film. Not only is it his most accessible feature to date, it's also a fabulous primer in capital-S Surrealism, making explicit the indebtedness of that movement and philosophy – very much still alive and active in today's Czech Republic – to Freud's talking cure.

Švankmajer has never been such an open book before as in this film, which even goes so far as to arm its audience with the knowledge of how to decode, if simplistically, symbols and imagery which appear not only in Surviving Life but which are endemic to his cinema. This know-how is imparted at narratively expedient intervals in psychoanalytical sessions conducted within the narrative, overseen by animated portraits of Freud and Jung who duke it out for dominion over interpretation of the games played by a Švankmajer-surrogate's unconscious mind during his sleep.

The mixture of crisp cut-out animation and live-action representations of the same characters and environs throughout the film is very appealing and is consistent with mixed media, multiple-representational practices in Švankmajer's work generally (see especially Faust (1994)), as well as with traditions in Czech theatre dating much farther back still – Surviving Life's to-ing and fro-ing between animation and live-action is most definitely not, as a cut-out Švankmajer explains in a jokey prelude, merely a function of a low budget which demands low overheads for catering, per diems, etc!

There's a lot more I'd like to say about Surviving Life, pending a little more time to digest it and, ideally, a second viewing this Sunday. There was, though, one thing that really struck me so much on that first viewing that I want to mention it right here and now, and that's that within the film's dreamscapes, there's something... someone... stalking the protagonist's dream self, an omnipresent entity, perhaps even a manifest omniscience, which assumes the form of a scornful old crone who's given to occasionally making herself, and her thoughts on proceedings, explicitly known. Yes, quite to my surprise, Švankmajer would seem in Surviving Life to be hinting at the existence of.... God. Or of something like that.

Surviving Life

Where this really interests me is in connection with a section in Andrei Codrescu's fabulous book, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, in which Codrescu explains how Tristan Tzara, founder of Surrealism's forefather movement, Dada, relished speaking gibberish not merely as a provocation and catalysing kick up the arse of modernism but also, just conceivably, to aim to reach beyond conscious thought in a quest for transcendence of things worldly in a manner practiced by his Kabbalistic Jewish forebears.

The Posthuman Dada Guide (I haven't it handy, so I can't quote page numbers) goes on, if I recall correctly, to assert that William Burroughs was striving for much the same end in his application of his celebrated cut-up method, where texts were reduced to particles and reassembled randomly, the better, hopefully, to reveal in the reassembly the hand of a divinity who might not be unknowable to us were we only, all of us, to be able to transcend the crippling limitations of language and its structures.

And now in 2011 here's Švankmajer, cutting up images, images of his narrative's players reorganised in a similarly recombinatory fashion, within a narrative wholly concerned with exploring the root functioning of a human mind, its motivations, and its memory, replete, replete, I say, with simply oodles of unmistakeably Edenic imagery and featuring an inamorata named Eva (sure, that is the name of Švankmajer's late wife and long time collaborator, but...) and with an all-seeing Godlike being overseeing the workings of the protagonist's unconscious throughout... Curiouser and curiouser!

It was certainly inspired programming that put Surviving Life back-to-back with fellow Czech Věra Chytilová's Fruit of Paradise (1970). Oh, such dialogue as flowed between them, for Fruit of Paradise is a veritable tripped-out Carry on Garden of Eden!

Considerably more formally experimental an affair even than the director's earlier, beloved Daisies (1966), Fruit of Paradise is amongst the most beautiful films I've ever had the pleasure of seeing on a big screen, beautiful in equal measure to its resistance to any easy articulation of what the fuck it's all about. It's a little bit Zabriskie Point – with rather more emphasis on the Zabriskie than on the point. It might be parts a cautionary allegory about the perils of knowledge in a society in which, back in the day, knowledge's possession could be seriously compromising. It's definitely in part a serial killer flick. And there's a very bizarre love triangle thrown in there too. But mostly it's just one glorious, messy, genuinely psychedelic enigma. As such, it sure won't be everyone's cup of Fernet, but it sure is mine. And oh that Zdeněk Liška score – it's sublime!

I would urge anyone who saw Fruit of Paradise and who would like to know a little more about it and its creators to turn firstly to Jim Knox's excellent program note on the MIFF website for insight into a film, and several of its esteemed makers, very dear to his (and my!) heart.

As for me, I'll be pausing some more in coming days to ponder this business of some of the art world figures I've long most esteemed and whom I associate with some of the most out-there, probing, revolutionary art practices and accomplishments of the 20th and 21st centuries, evidently demonstrating a not at all incompatible keen interest in bothering God, something I've never myself consciously thought to devote much time nor energy to at all.

*

To close, I really can't be arsed knocking up another iteration of my MIFF release dates table, but here's word nonetheless of a few more release date developments:

The Woman: 18 Aug 2011
Persecution Blues: The Battle for the Tote: 25 Aug 2011
Face to Face: 8 Sep 2011
Fire in Babylon: 15 Sep 2011
Project Nim: 29 Sep 2011
The Innkeepers: TBA

Coming Attractions, or: Addenda to Last Week's MIFF Picks

(including an updated list of festival films with distribution, below)

We are now but a week out from the commencement of the 60^th MIFF and I expect we've all found a bit of time since my post a week ago to trawl through the pages of the MIFF program, whether in print or in the ether, to arrive at a some parts-informed, some parts-quixotic plan to engage with this elephantine festival as best and most comprehensively we can.

Since writing my last week's post, in which I tipped as many as 15 hot picks for the 2011 MIFF, I've delved further into the program and, naturally, come across numerous other offerings that deserve attention cast upon them.

Outer Space

Straight off, I am guilty of one serious oversight in my initial selection of 15, and that is my neglecting the coming to Melbourne of the great Austrian materialist filmmaker, Peter Tscherkassky, to present not just two packages of his extraordinary short films but also a masterclass.

(By 'materialist' I in no way mean to suggest that Tscherkassky is preoccupied in life with the accumulation of material wealth – he's far too firmly ensconced at the polar wrong end of the film production spectrum to be accusable of that – but rather that his is a practice in which the very material of film is critical, both to his films' means of production and to their very content. With respect to the latter, it's not just the found filmed image that lights up the screen in his works, with all its echoes of past big screen glories (or ignominies), but also everything else that is of the film itself: optical soundtracks, sprocket holes, and no small amount of flicker, all subject to hyper-quick montage and rapid-fire distortions and superimpositions, wreaking often terrible and cacophonous violence upon anything and everything ensnared within the frame.)

Outer Space (1999), which utilises select footage from Sidney J. Furie's little loved early '80s horror film The Entity starring Barbara Hershey, is the brilliant and exhilaratingly harrowing film of his I'm most familiar with, and while you can find it on YouTube, you'd have to be completely daft not to avail yourself of an opportunity to see to experience it, and many other of Tscherkassky's screen cultural history-pillaging works in a cinema during MIFF. For it is only in a darkened cinema, with his films projected onto a big screen and their soundtracks run through a cinema's sound system, that his work will be done justice to and their full impact felt.

Sure, it's a banal truism that all films are better seen in a cinema, but there are filmmakers for whose works this holds true more profoundly than for others. Tscherkassky – as with any materialist – is absolutely, essentially one such filmmaker. (Why, he even hand-prints his films!) Along McLuhanesque lines, in Tscherkassky's films the medium is indeed the message... and the message the messenger...

I'm sure, furthermore, that he'll make for a fascinating guest. Rare it is indeed around these parts to be granted an opportunity to partake of an audience with a film artist, who, notwithstanding that his is a cultural produce altogether reliant upon a regurgitation of (sometimes recognisable) found footage, is irrefutably the auteur of his films, so much incontestably more so than those who perforce must marshal and rely upon the cooperation of even the smallest of crews for their most personal, and indie-est, of indie productions. For it is just Tscherkassky, and Tscherkassky alone, of an order of solitary obsessiveness equal to that also necessarily found in lone stop-motion animators, who manipulates – and prints – every single frame – temporally and compositionally speaking – of his extraordinary short films.

Other offerings to have escaped my attention last week

Some new canon fodder

Buried deep within the shorts programs is Scenes from the Suburbs, a half hour-long short from Spike Jonze in collaboration with members of Arcade Fire. There's a whole lotta love out there for both Jonze and the revered Canadian indie band, but their admirers have got their work cut out for them even learning this film's in the program, what with so little focus routinely shone upon MIFF's short form offerings. Here at least is drawing a little attention to it now.

(Also buried in the various shorts programs, and granted but one opportunity each to light up the big screen during MIFF, are new works from Luc Moullet; Bens Russell and Rivers; Ken Jacobs, and Joan C. Gratz, whose stunning 1992 short Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase is one of my favourite animated films of all time.)

There are two new films from MIFF favourite Hong Sang-soo: The Day He Arrives and Oki's Movie. I'm yet to hop on the Hong bandwagon, never mind the plenty of opportunities previously granted. So perhaps now's about time.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Madman are attached to this one, but it'd be an awful shame if it were to go to straight to DVD and a chance to see it on the big screen were to go begging. I've seen two of director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's recent films before – Climates and Three Monkeys – and wish I'd seen still more. Expect beautiful CinemaScope cinematography and, by most police procedurals' standards, a likely very languid pace indeed...

There's a new film from latter-day MIFF stalwart Jia Zhangke, I Wish I Knew. I wish I knew what so many other people see in so much of Jia's work, but this documentary about Shanghai sounds very interesting. Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien – another celebrated contemporary filmmaker I've never quite latched onto, aside from his splendid 1989 film A City of Sadness – is one of the many and various folks in this doco whose thoughts on the Shanghai of yesteryears are sought.

There's also a new film from that brilliantly nasty piece of work, Bruno Dumont: Outside Satan. I expect it will be stark and languid but punctuated by sudden bursts of ghastliness which may have some sort of significance of a religious bent. Or may not.

Belgian kitchen sinkers par excellence, the Dardenne brothers, have a new film. It is prosaically entitled The Kid with a Bike. My gut feeling: the kid may not wind up having a bike for the whole film. And/or the bike is but a MacGuffin. Either way, my prediction is for one unhappy kid. And for a depressed, but ultimately impressed viewer. Them Dardennes, they deliver.

Takeshi Kitano is back! With Outrage! Folks are saying it's a great return to form. Hooray! (if they're right.)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog's new-ish 3D cave art doco is a must-see! (obvs.) But now, or in release?

To my shame, I am yet to see a film by the fearsomely celebrated French auteur, provocateur and Deleuzian sensorialist (sic?) of renown, Philippe Grandrieux. This year's offering, It May be that Beauty has Strengthened our Resolve - Masao Adachi, looks like a suitably prepossessing initiation into the cult of Grandrieux.

And...

Of course, there's more, including a double return to the fold from the as ever capable-of-anything Takashi Miike, whose unfathomably prolific and protean work I hope I'll fall back in love with, and there's a whole slew of older canon fodder in the MIFF 60^th Retrospective section, including the excruciatingly uncomfortable viewing experience that is Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy.

It always astonishes me that every time this 1982 film re-emerges, it is said still to be little known and underseen. Really? Even now? Nevertheless, it is inarguably a great film and one which further debunks the myth that the English have a monopoly on the comedy of discomfort so exemplified by the works of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant – and nor did the English necessarily even arrive at it first. That said, perhaps it is only now that The King of Comedy's time has come and it'll find that audience long trumpeted as ignorant of its charms.

Some word on a few titles I've already seen

The First Interview

As I mentioned last week, I've seen Dennis Tupicoff's lovely, Agnès Varda-narrated short, The First Interview, and can recommend it highly.

I have a middling amount of enthusiasm for Bi, Don’t Be Afraid, which, as I now cannibalise my report for Senses of Cinema on the 25th Fribourg International Film Festival, is “an often droll film with simmering erotic undercurrents occasionally boiling over”, “languidly observ[ing] a few days in the life of six year-old Bi’s Hanoi family, newly extended through the surprise return of a seriously ailing grandfather”. It's quite a nice film enlivened by a little matter-of-fact perversity.

I have less enthusiasm for Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, which closed that same festival and about which I said in that same report “I didn’t much care for [its] guns a-blazing, gung-ho actioneering, no matter how commendable its explicit attack on entrenched corruption in Brazil. (Also, I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to run with a voiceover throughout an entire film.)” And I'm right; it's not.

I have also seen, more recently, The Eye of the Storm, upon which a critical embargo has just been placed (dagnabbit!) and Norwegian Wood. Notwithstanding an impressive pan-cultural array of talent associated with it (the director is Tran Anh Hung; the cinematographer is Mark Lee "In the Mood for Love" Ping Bin, and it features a (dreadful, overstated) score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood), Norwegian Wood has completely put me off ever reading Haruki Murakami, whose book it adapts. What a ridiculous story, played so flatly, and with the great, tragic 'problem' at the core of the story being one so preposterously simple to remedy.

Now here's that list

It's ordered alphabetically this time. Bold type indicates where dates have been announced in the week since my previous post; all four films thus emboldened will enjoy at least a short stint at Carlton's Cinema Nova.

TITLE	DISTRIBUTOR	DATE OF RELEASE	SECTION
13 Assassins	Icon	8 Sep 2011	Accent on Asia
33 Postcards	Titan View	TBA	Aust. Showcase
A Separation	Hopscotch	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Africa United	Hopscotch	TBA	Next Gen
Another Earth	Fox	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Beauty	Palace	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Beginners	Hopscotch	25 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
Being Elmo	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Ben Lee: Catch My Disease	Madman	TBA	Backbeat
Bobby Fischer against The World	Madman	TBA	This Sporting Life
Brother Number One	Antidote	TBA	Documentaries
Buck	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Cave of Forgotten Dreams	Rialto	22 Sep 2011	Documentaries
Circumstance	Vendetta	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Drive	Pinnacle	TBA Oct 2011	Closing Night
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress	Madman	6 Oct 2011	Documentaries
Elena	Palace	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within	Madman	TBA	Crime Scene
Fire in Babylon	Madman	TBA	This Sporting Life
Footnote	Rialto	1 Jan 2012	Int'l Panorama
Guilty of Romance	Monster	TBA	Accent on Asia
HERE	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Hobo with a Shotgun	Transmission	TBA	Night Shift
Jane Eyre	Universal	11 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
Jiro Dreams of Sushi	Curious	TBA	Documentaries
Kill List	Madman	TBA	Night Shift
Knuckle	Hopscotch	DVD – 15 Sep 2011	This Sporting Life
Le Havre	Sharmill	TBA	Int'l Panorama
LennoNYC	Transmission	DVD – 11 Aug 2011	Backbeat
Life in a Day	Transmission	TBA Aug 2011	Networked
Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Martha Marcy May Marlene	Fox	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Medianeras	Aztec	TBA	Networked
Melancholia	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Mysteries of Lisbon	Rialto	1 Jan 2012	Prime Time
Neds	Transmission	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Norwegian Wood	Curious	6 Oct 2011	Accent on Asia
Once upon a Time in Anatolia	Madman	TBA	Crime Scene
Our Idiot Brother	Roadshow	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Outrage	Madman	TBA	Accent on Asia
Page One: Inside The New York Times	Madman	18 Aug 2011	Documentaries
Persecution Blues: The Battle for the Tote	Madman	TBA	Backbeat
Play	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold	Madman	11 Aug 2011	Documentaries
Position among the Stars	Antidote	TBA	Documentaries
PressPausePlay	Madman	TBA	Networked
Project Nim	Icon	TBA 2011	Documentaries
Red Dog	Roadshow	4 Aug 2011	Aust. Showcase
Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Route Irish	Transmission	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Senna	Universal	11 Aug 2011	This Sporting Life
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure	Madman	TBA	Aust. Showcase
Silent Souls	Icon	TBA 2011	Int'l Panorama
Sing Your Song	Madman	TBA	Backbeat
Submarine	Madman	1 or 8 Sep 2011	Int'l Panorama
Super	Roadshow	TBA	Night Shift
Tabloid	Antidote	22 Sep 2011	Documentaries
Take Shelter	Sony	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Terri	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975	Curious	TBA	Backbeat
The Eye of the Storm	Transmission	15 Sep 2011	Aust. Showcase
The Forgiveness of Blood	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Future	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Giants	Palace	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Guard	Transmission	25 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
The Kid with a Bike	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Salt of Life	Rialto	19 Jan 2012	Int'l Panorama
The Solitude of Prime Numbers	Aztec	TBA	TeleScope
The Woman	Monster	TBA	Night Shift
The Yellow Sea	Monster	TBA	Accent on Asia
Think Global, Act Rural	Hopscotch	TBA	Documentaries
This is England '86	Madman	TBA	Prime Time
Tomboy	Rialto	17 Nov 2011	Int'l Panorama
Toomelah	Curious	TBA Nov 2011	Aust. Showcase
Troll Hunter	Madman	TBA	Night Shift
Troubadours	Universal Music	TBA	Backbeat
Tyrannosaur	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Viva Riva!	Rialto	1 Jan 2012	Crime Scene
Win Win	Fox	18 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
X	Potential	Early Sep 2011	Aust. Showcase